Bob Maistros

Well.  Yesterday I was merely a Neanderthal and a bigot.  Today I’m also a strawman taking punches for my North Star pen pal Dacia Nichol.  Always happy to help, amiga.

The problem is that the strawmen at which Dacia is actually flailing are all of her own construction.  For example, the curious notion that I – a person definitively of the male persuasion – would imagine that we guys can only act like Neanderthals.

What America really wants.

I happen to think very highly of my own sex.  After all, with fellas at the helm, America tossed out the Brits; drafted the Declaration and the Constitution; built a country coast-to-coast; invented the light bulb, the telephone, the phonograph, the automobile, the electrical grid, motion pictures, nuclear power, transistors, semiconductors, computers and the Internet; won a mess of wars, including two big ones; pretty much grew the biggest, baddest economic machine the world has ever seen; and, for the most part, safeguarded America’s freedom not just from enemies abroad but also from rapacious and interfering government.

Oh, and by the way:  along the line, many if not most of us turned out to be pretty good, reliable husbands and fathers.

Along the way, however, something rather momentous happened:  women got the right to vote.  (Not saying it shouldn’t have happened; just making an observation here.)  Starting soon thereafter, the so-called gender gap at the polls delivered three-quarters of a century of largely Democratic rule, and the government started to morph into – well, for want of a better term – the nanny state.

One of the areas where Supernanny decided to boss us around was the war between the sexes – in the home, the workplace and at school.  And we all know on whose side she intervened: over the last two generations, every issue involving the sexes has been portrayed as government, husbands, schools, businesses, the healthcare system, and so on, either oppressing or underserving women.

The result has been two-fold:  first, a series of actions to “liberate” (we forget the term these days) or promote women, from no-fault divorce to abortion to speech and conduct codes to affirmative action to child-care tax credits, and of course, a growing range of mandated benefits and offerings to accommodate women.

And, unfortunately, the flip side of women’s release from Betty Draper-hood, as Dacia might put it, is a government at war against boys (there’s even a book by that name) and men.  Schools became feminized, rules-driven, goody-behavior-rewarding, “project”-obsessed, zero-tolerance paradises for girls and prisons for boys.  Affirmative action rewards companies for “diverse hires” involving white, highly educated upper-middle-class women as much as for bringing in disadvantaged minorities.

As I pointed out yesterday, girls and women are benefiting up and down the line in the educational system and increasingly, the workforce.  While young males, starved for encouragement and opportunity, have descended into slacking, X Box-addicted man-children, delaying or completely putting off adult responsibilities like marriage and family-raising.

Dacia’s second, equally absurd scarecrow is that I somehow want or expect women to act like men.  I couldn’t want anything less.

To reiterate, for all its ordering about, one thing the government can’t alter is natures.  Men want to be men: risk-takers, competitors, entrepreneurs, innovators, hunter-gatherer-providers. And women women:  nurturers, communicators, collaborators – and wives and mothers.   I’ve worked with glamorous, talented women wedded to their careers who expressed their envy of my spouse, the mother of six children.  They wanted to have kids, and not to pawn them off to daycare.

But don’t believe me.   Check out the Pew Research survey study done for TIME this fall.  Yes, only 30 percent of Americans believe that the “ideal marriage” involves a husband supporting the family and a wife staying home with the children.  But 67 percent thought that it was important for men to be able to support their families.  And a large plurality consider it bad for society for mothers of young children to work outside the home.

Of course, I’m oversimplifying, and of course, under the relentless pressure from Big Government, Big Media and increasingly, Big Business, the politically correct answers to the poll questions are changing.

But here’s what I really want:  I want Supernanny in all her forms to get out of the middle and get her thumb off the scale.  Let boys act like boys, girls act like girls, men act like men and women act like women.  Let husbands and wives and employees and employers work out matters for themselves.  Let parents and schools develop the best way to educate boys and girls.

That means a neutral tax code that doesn’t force families with stay-at-home moms to subsidize working families.  It means systems of learning – including possibly separate schools for boys – that allow and encourage them to develop their unique skills, not as Neanderthals, but as leaders and as men.

If Dacia’s vision of a “neo-con feminism” is what people want, men, women, husbands, wives, families, businesses, then let them – us – decide.  Let us develop the programs and institutions.  I think we would develop not strawmen, but a sturdy, 21st century version of marriage and family.

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